Standing Still
by bisexualcharliedavis
Summary: Whumptober day 14: "Don't Move" Charlie really should learn not to think like a cop. (Prison au)


A/N: I've spoken about this AU on discord but never really done anything with it. But i've still got a lot of prompts to fill so I figure now is as good a time as any to give it a whirl. warnings for a beat down given to neither of the main characters, prison is a bad place, and very mild charlie/omc.

"Don't move, Davis."

From his hidden vantage point, Charlie had all but front row seats to the beating being administered to his fellow prisoner. It was a severe one too. They had the mop handles out and everything. The prisoner getting wailed on kept trying to dig his fingers into the concrete ground and scrabble away, only to be pulled into the fray again. More than once, he'd seen them let him get a few feet away, just to grab him by his obviously fractured left ankle and pull him back to beat him further.

"I wasn't planning on it." He whispered back, to the voice behind him.

The man being beaten let out a particularly harrowing scream, and Charlie notes five blood trails on the ground under his fingers. He'd been beaten plenty of times since arriving here, but never like this. He felt like he couldn't take his eyes off it, his instincts telling him to break up the fight, to be a cop, to rescue the poor fucker.

"Let's go." The person behind him took hold of his arm, and Charlie unwillingly turned away, and followed him down the long passageway back to the cells, and returned to his own. Home sweet concrete home. The cell had a steel toilet, a sink, and a hot and cold tap. There was a single desk, littered with a few letters and pictures, and a bunk bed on the remaining wall. The blankets on the bed were dirty orange in colour, and faded from years of use without replacement.

He sat on the bottom bunk and slowly looked to his hands, wondering what exactly had become of him in the last few years. In his past life, he would never have let that happen in his presence. It didn't really matter what that man's crime was, he did not deserve to be so cruelly beaten. Or maybe he did. He supposed he would beat Bernie like that if he ever found out the man so much as raised a finger to his mother. Maybe if he found out that the man was abusing his children, he could justify it. An eye for an eye that sort of business.

He shook the thoughts away physically and looked up. Jame, his cellmate, was leaning of the frame of the door to their cell.

"You have to stop thinking like a cop." He said, seriously, and James wasn't serious very often. In the light, his high cheekbones give him a sort of skeletal look. He was a handsome man, but sharp. Sharp jaw, sharp cheeks, sharp nose. "They'll kill you." He says as if Charlie didn't know that already.

In jail, people don't care much for coppers. People except for James, who had taken Charlie on in a friend the same way that you take in a beaten, lost puppy in a rainstorm. Or something very poetic like that.

Charlie didn't have a lot going his way, given that he was in prison and all, but he did have James. And he needed the other man, especially now. Especially since the outside world seemed to have just forgotten about him. His last letter from his mother had been from a lawyer, telling him to stop writing letters, and she was cutting him out of her will. His last letter from Rose had been to announce that she was starting a little magazine up in Darwin and she might not be able to write to him for a while. His last letter from Jean, the most recent, was simply telling him the same empty promises he'd been hearing for the last three years.

Blake is trying his best to find a way to get you out, he's so close that it's surely just a few more months and everything will be sorted out. Can you just hold on for a few more months?

He liked the second half of the letter better, when she told him all about her plans for her career, and how she was finding being an elected official. He was happy that she'd found something new to do with her time. He didn't want everyone to put their lives at a standstill for him. But to hear about them all moving on, and him stuck here...It hurt.

"I wasn't thinking like a cop."

"Yeah? Then why the fuck would you be out and about, perving on some dude getting the living shit beat outta him?"

Charlie didn't have an answer. If they'd decided to beat on him as well, and given the (according to James) Timbuktoo sized target on his back that was probably on the cards, there was no one to help him. James was not big, or strong. He was of average height and extremely lanky.

Maybe, he thought mirthlessly, that was why James kept him around. Charlie had, over the years, built up some muscle mass, and could look kind of intimidating, with his big throat scar from an attempted shanking, and the scar that wrapped from behind his left ear to just about his right eyebrow behind the back of his head. Like saying 'look what I've already survived. What could you possibly do to me that is worse than this?'

" It's hard to stop thinking like a cop when I was one more than half my life. I just wanted to see what was going on." James kept looking at him; as if he could ascertain some shred of information that even Charlie himself wasn't privy too.

"Maybe that why I can't understand you, 'cause I've been a crook more than half of mine."

If he finds it or not, Charlie can't tell. He walked over to the bottom bunk and sat next to him. His hand lands on top of his and he doesn't push it away, doesn't tell him no. And he doesn't want to.

"In any other place, at any other time -" He begins to say, but James stops him by squeezing his hand.

"I'm being paroled next month."

"I figured that was why you hadn't told me yet," Charlie says, glad to have heard it from him rather than just wake up one morning to find him gone. It made sense, James was in for fraud, not double murder like Charlie. He'd known this was going to happen but helplessly, he wished for more time. Everyone did, he thought to himself, everyone did.

"I'm going straight."

"That's good." He said, pleasantly surprised. James had always said that it was his calling to take advantage of suckers.

"Is your doctor Blake still in Ballarat?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Because I want to help."

"Jimmy -"

"No. Charlie, this is your life."

"It's your life too, and I don't want you to waste it. I'd count it lucky if Blake put an hour a week into this case. He's the smartest person I've ever met and if he can't free me...Well, then I doubt anyone can."

"So you're just giving up."

"I guess so."

"I won't let you do that." James said, sharply, "I'm not going to let you waste away in here. I want to figure out what this thing we have is, and we can't do it in here, so we have to do it out there."

"Please -"

"You won't change my mind on this."

He was probably right, so Charlie stopped trying to convince him otherwise. James swaps the subject to something lighter as the beating outside gets more intense.

"You need a side hustle, so you have comm money when I'm outta here."

"I survive on prison meals alone before I met you."

"And you almost starved to death. Do you know how to make hooch?"


End file.
